East Lansing Artists Featured in ArtPrize

Since 2009, the City of Grand Rapids has filled museums, restaurants, parks and other public spaces with works of art for an annual cultural festival called ArtPrize. 

Artist submissions come from every corner of the planet and more than $400,000 in prizes will be awarded by a public vote and a jury of art critics as part of the festival. East Lansing Info spoke with five East Lansing artists who will have pieces on display for the festival.

Elijah Hamilton-Wray

Elijah Hamilton-Wray’s piece, “The Elder,” is from a collection he completed for his Master of Fine Arts degree at Northern Vermont University. The painting shows the artist at two stages of life: on the left as an old man and on the right as he appears today.

“I was exploring self-portraiture,” he told ELi in a phone interview. “It’s kind of a surreal setting with an empty diner and the windows showing different landscapes.”

He said the tense faces in his painting were intentional, exploring the time and age of the subjects, with the older man trying to reconcile his younger self with what he became and the younger self wondering what he experienced to become the old man.

“He’s asking, ‘What have you done with your life? Are you happy with it?’” Hamilton-Wray said.

His interest in art and creativity stretches back to his childhood, he said. He would animate comic books, and he said he started taking art seriously once he took a drawing course during his freshman year of college.

“Art is a great place to go to have fun,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be super serious, you know. I still love painting superheroes. Like, that’s the most fun thing that I do. Make sure you’re having fun doing art if you really want to pursue it.”

Hamilton-Wray’s painting is on display at Muse, an interactive art gallery, at 727 Leonard St. NW in Grand Rapids.

Kristin Pennock

Kristin Pennock is an East Lansing architect who turned disappointing allergies into a year-long food diary sketchbook. She said she began the exercise of drawing what she ate to study how the foods affected how she felt. Eventually, it became a creative outlet.

She designed a custom accordion sketchbook cut from giant rolls of paper, keeping it small so it was always nearby.

“They had to be sized so that they would fit in my purse, because I had to have them on me at all times,” she said in a phone interview. “Almost all the food was drawn before I ate it. I had it all right there [in my purse], the pens, the watercolors, so that I could just be, even at Costco, propping my sketchbook on the cart before I ate a free sample.”

Pennock said it became more troublesome to eat at restaurants because she would have to confer with kitchen staff to determine what was safe for her to eat. But instead of staying home and “eating rice and chicken every day,” she forced herself to go out. The project came during a time of travel, including trips to Greece and India.

Early in the year, her sketches focused on the food and the plating, she said. But in the middle of the project, her father died while she was traveling.

“I still have to eat, I still have to draw, but there’s absolutely no way on the day that my dad passed away that I can only draw food in my sketchbook,” she said. “I mean, he needs to be recognized somehow in the sketchbook.

“Then the first person who shows up is my dad’s picture at his funeral luncheon … on the table with the food, we had his framed photograph there. So he makes it into the background of the food in that one. And then after that, the gates sort of burst open, and everybody ended up in my sketchbook.”

Pennock’s sketchbook is on display at DeVos Place Convention Center, 303 Monroe Ave. NW in Grand Rapids.

Bruce Macklay

Bruce Macklay told ELi he was raised by a single parent and consequently spent a lot of time in daycare and with various babysitters.

“The only real thing to do was draw,” he said. “I mean, everybody had some paper and pencil.”

The drawings led to more expressive, personal creations. His ArtPrize submission, for example, came to fruition during a time when he said he was frustrated.

“It’s actually part of something I scrapped years ago, pre-COVID,” he said. “I bought all these screws, some of them were six inches long, and [the piece] was two hands together holding water. And then COVID hit, put me in a funk, and I just put it away, and I had no desire to return to it. I yanked the screws out, put them in boxes, and I thought, I can’t let these sit here. I gotta do something with it. So that’s where this came from.”

He dubbed the piece “Kilimanjaro,” appropriately titled because the nails are hammered to varying depths and have been painted to display a topographical dimension that evolves as light hits it.

“I try to be fearless,” Macklay said of his art. “And that comes with consequences because I screw up a lot, I learn a lot. I waste a lot of material like with wood, you know, and learning all that. And I’ve made my fair share of errors, but you know, your brain never really goes back to the way it was before.”

To those considering their first creation, he advised them not to be intimidated or overwhelmed by all the greatness around them. He said if he were starting out today with “AI-generated stuff,” he would wonder why he was even bothering to create something.

“You can’t look at it that way,” he said. “Draw inspiration from music, and surround yourself with different things that engage your mind and engage your thoughts, engage your curiosity and imagination.”

Macklay’s piece hangs at the ArtPrize Clubhouse, 428 Bridge St. NW in Grand Rapids.

Bill Ravlin

Bill Ravlin has been interested in photography since grade school, when he had a darkroom where he developed his photos. He told ELi in a phone call that the demands of life forced him away from the practice, but the accessibility of digital photography brought it back into his life 25 years ago.

An entomologist by training, he earned three degrees from Michigan State University before entering academia at Virginia Tech University and then Ohio State University.

In 2014, Ravlin moved back to East Lansing, becoming chair of the Michigan State University Department of Entomology.

“Taking photographs of birds, insects, and natural settings,” he said, “that’s always been my focus. About 5 years ago, I had decided I was going to try to capture the biological essence of Michigan State University’s natural areas. Most people think of Baker Woodlot as being a natural area, which it is, but it turns out there’s actually about 25 of them dotting the campus.”

His ArtPrize photo series came from a session at Gietzel Wetland near the farms on south campus. Surrounded by dense vegetation and poison ivy and with no real public access, he would observe the birds. Ravlin said he has taken thousands of pictures of birds in the area and documented more than 100 different species.

“I spent a lot of time sitting and waiting,” he said. “But then I heard a bird call that I wasn’t familiar with and [I] saw birds diving out of the air and swooping and circling and so on, and realized it was a peregrine falcon.”

He believes it might be the same bird that nests on top of Spartan Stadium, but he finally snapped photos of the bird on his second day of observing it. Over the course of seven minutes, he said he took 367 photos. Fitting three together, he submitted the series to ArtPrize and called it “Falco’s Regard.”

Ravlin’s photos are on display at Holiday Inn Grand Rapids Downtown, 310 Pearl St. NW.

Taylor Mouroufas

Taylor Mouroufas told ELi she started making art as soon as she could hold a brush. But she fell in love with oils in 2019. When it came to this year’s ArtPrize, she knew she wanted to do something grander than her previous submissions.

“I was thrifting around here in East Lansing,” she said in a phone interview, “and I came across this typewriter. I looked into it more and found that Fox brand typewriter. I think it’s a number three, and it was manufactured in the early 1900s out of Grand Rapids. I was like, ‘Oh, it’s Kismet.’ It’s perfect. It’s destined to be for ArtPrize.”

A huge fan of singer Taylor Swift, Mouroufas has made several paintings based on the lyrics of Swift’s songs. Her favorite album is Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department,” and this painting’s name is derived from the first song on the record, “Fortnight.”

Mouroufas said the lyrics of a love that’s ruining the life of the singer tied perfectly into the image of an old typewriter on fire and being destroyed. The added pill bottle and moths, she said, are Easter eggs like the ones Swift hides in her songs. 

Mouroufas said she spent more than 100 hours on the piece.

“You don’t have to have it all figured out,” she said when asked about the advice she would give an artist just starting out. “You don’t have to have all the right techniques or be perfect. Let it come to you. I’m completely self-taught, I didn’t go to school for art. I had to teach all this myself. It took many years. It took a lot of work and dedication. But what brought me to that, to where I am now, is just the passion that I have for art. I followed my excitement, followed my passion and let it all just kind of create this amazing place where I’m at right now. It all came from just the dedication and passion that I have for art. That’s where it all starts.”

Mouroufas’s piece is on display at Riverside Guitar School, 1533 Wealthy St. SE in Grand Rapids.

Art is on display until Oct. 3, and the public can vote for their favorites until Oct. 4.